Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “blue 2”, is said to be a reminder from 2008. And it’s about evolution, with the point that if organisms had been intelligently designed by a creator, they wouldn’t have glitches like the one the barmaid describes. Or our bad backs or wisdom teeth. . . .
Or nipples on men.
The idea of the human body being perfect always seemed ridiculous to me. Why don’t we have echolocation like bats? A magnetic sense like sharks and the platypus? Why are our eyes lousy compared to that of an eagle? Why do our teeth rot instead of continually growing and being ground off (horses) or being replaced (sharks)? One could go on and on.
My dad, who was a minister when I was kid, actually used the latter example as an illustration of the perfection of divine design in a sermon once. He told us to imagine how ridiculous it would be if we had to keep clipping our teeth instead of our finger- and toenails. I remember thinking that would probably save us untold pain, infection and even death, especially in the ages before modern dentistry, and it was one episode that led me to realize that evolution was vastly more convincing than the creation stories.
Good one! The reason why our airway and GI tract are conjoined is because of the genetic program for development. And the reason why we have this program to generate this dumb design is because our distant fish ancestors augmented respiration through their gills by pumping water past their heavily vascularized pharynx, as fishes still do today. Our branch from fish-dom include lungfishes where the pharynx is modified to have simple lungs.
It is far far easier to keep an old genetic program that is ‘good enough’ than to re-invent a new one, especially since the loss in fitness with the dumb program is not that bad.
Discussions like this always bring me back to the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which innervates the larynx. This (these, actually two, a right and a left) is a branch of the vagus nerve, and loops around the heart. In humans, this is not such long distance to travel, but in the giraffe its long journey down the neck, and back up again, is less than an optimal “design.”
One of my favorites. Along with the point that you and I are on our 3rd pair of kidneys now, thanks to our fishy and amphibian relatives.
Indeed, and while in the giraffe the nerve is ca. 4-5 m. long, in the Supersaurus it would have reached ca. 28 m.! (So Wikipedia.)
The absolute clincher argument to refute intelligent design is that recurrent laryngeal nerve that loops around the aorta to get to the Pharynx in vertebrates from fishes to giraffes. It ONLY makes sense in light of the evolution of necks in mammals with no path of incremental random changes which would provide a direct route for that nerve. It’s existence makes a mockery of the idea that animal bodies were intelligently designed. Any mere human designer who left something so absurd in their final design of any machine would be fired on the spot. It is one thing for the creator of the Universe to work in mysterious ways in order to reconcile the existence of evil with a benevolent god, but to also “intelligently design” something so monumentally and glaringly stupid?